A LESSON RE-LEARNED FROM OUR GPS

Last Christmas our grandkids gave us a GPS, thinking it would aid our travels. Michael and I looked at each other, saying, " What are we gonna do with this? How long have we lived without one and get around just fine!" With a closed mind, and a few glances at the manual, we made a couple half-hearted attempts to start it and decided the darn thing didn't work anyway.
Dutifully we displayed it in the car when we went back east; not that we used it, but as a visual testimony of appreciation of the gift. When one of Michael's nephews asked how we liked it and told us how much he used his, we had to confess that we didn't think it worked. He looked at it, tapped the screen a few times, and said, "There, you just didn't have the fweeewww activated. It tells you all about it in the manual."

Shortly thereafter we set a destination in an unfamiliar city on the GPS and to our astonishment a little figure of our car crawled along the highways on the screen and a reassuring voice told us, "In .03 miles turn left onto U.S Route 20." At one point Michael decided he didn't like that route and defiantlyturned onto another road. Patiently the voice said, "Recalculating route,"and started giving new directions. Before we knew it we arrived at our destination without a hitch. For the next few trips we intentionally made wrong turns trying to confound the thing, but each time it calmly redirected us. Often we mused on how a machine could keep track of millions of cars going their million ways and still know where we should make our next turn. Eventually we gave up trying to figure it out and now we just rely on its directions being the best choice.

Laughingly we decided the process evolved a lot like our introduction to AA. At first we were suspicious of AA's ability to better our life. We avoided reading the instructions (the Big Book) and couldn't believe The Program would show us the way out of our misery. Often we defiently went our own route and found it took far longer to get to a state of peace than it did for others who followed The Steps as suggested. When we asked for help, got a sponsor, and stopped trying to figure out how The Program works, or our Higher Power, it has worked just fine.

Hello to our friends in the East. We drove many miles through snow so we got our taste of winter, and today thought of you all as we sat by the pool enjoying extended summer.